The Media and the Campaign

Abstract

In a column for the Irish Times after the May 17 election, Paul Cullen accused his fellow journalists of having ‘settled for a bit part in a farce of a campaign’.¹ He complained that this election campaign, driven by ‘Fianna Fáil’s phenomenal media machinery … was run as a piece of entertainment’, that the press relied heavily as never before on national and constituency polls, at least some of which were ‘misleading and unscientific’, that both press and television let PR professionals feed them their headlines, facilitated a personality driven campaign largely void of issues, and that ‘journalists, who should be setting the agenda on behalf of the people, ended up running around helplessly after the politicians, falling for their cheap publicity stunts and failing to ask the hard questions’.